Thursday, May 18, 2017

That is from the new and interesting Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, by Ben Blatt. The Hemingway book with the highest usage rate for -ly adverbs, True at First Light,
was released only after his death and is considered one of his worst
works. The same pattern is true for Faulkner and Steinbeck, namely that
the most highly praised works have relatively low rates of -ly adverb
usage. Among other notable authors surveyed, D.H. Lawrence seems to be
the most obvious exception to this regularity.

In the novel The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien used the word “she” only once. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, however, she relative to he is used 79% of the time, the highest ratio of the classics surveyed....

In the linked ValleyWag (a Gawker property i.e. "It's dead Jim") piece the WSJ is quoted as saying there are 161 startups with the -ly (or variant -li) ending in their name There are actually many more but we'll use the Journal's number.
Divided into AngeList's 29,566 Silicon Valley startups and you end up with the occurrence of corporate names ending in -ly quoted in the headline, 54.45.